Email folder permissions - iPhone can't send...

I have an odd issue. I user called me and said that their iPhone could not send emails via the server using and iPhone (server using Dovecot and Exim). After much messing I noticed she was accessing two accounts with her phone, one worked fine, one didn't work from her phone, but worked from Roundcube.

I checked the folders and found her permissions on the folders in:

/home/user/mail/domain.com/

These are the email accounts.

heraccount1 was set to 770 (Could send)
heraccount2 was set to 750 (Could not send)

I set heraccount2 to 770 and she was able to send without a problem using both her iPhone and Roundcube.

The issue here is why is this effecting just her iPhone being able to send? I'm 100% positive that the small change in permissions made this works, but what does mail box permissions have to do with Exim and the type of device that is sending mail?

Also, why are the permissions so random? It seems that I have a mix of 770 and 750 in all my mail accounts.

There were some comment differences and one block about static routes that was missing, but none of that was significant. One significant thing that I did notice is that the old server was not running Antirelayd. So the question is, if the iPhone wasn't authenticating properly, would Antirelayd pick up the slack? I guess it would.

Staff Member

Antirelayd provides POP3 before SMTP authentication, allowing you to authenticate in POP without having to authenticate again for SMTP. This could definitely have an impact on authentication for a device.

Staff Member

If you would like to open up a ticket and provide login credentials for both machines (the working one and the non-working one) so we can check the differences, please use WHM > Support Center > Contact cPanel or the link in my signature.